Hi everyone! We’ve got some news about Simulator, the upcoming major update to Derail Valley! Though you may have seen me share details about the update’s new expected release date on Discord and Steam forums in prior months, I wanted us to first start the closed beta and make sure things work as anticipated, before making an official announcement. It’s been a bit over a year that we’ve been working on Simulator. As the headline suggests, we recently started the closed beta with our most trusted community members. This comes after a few weeks of testing internally by the dev team. We’re making improvements with weekly iterations, and so far, the progress has been going great! No major issues came up during testing, and we don’t expect any in the following period either. That said, we are moving the release slightly from the previous announcement, namely to around March of next year. We’re doing this for a couple of reasons, but mainly to accommodate a couple more features and content than initially planned, and to avoid the Christmas press saturation. It will be absolutely worth the wait. Currently, we’re working on a lot of things simultaneously. Some of those things will be part of Simulator, and others will come later. We’ve [url=https://steamcommunity.com/games/588030/announcements/detail/2962787743597062470]previously announced[/url] exactly what is coming in the major update (along with the upcoming price increase), but to avoid any confusion, here’s the full listing: [b]Coming in Simulator:[/b]

• Day and Night Cycle
• Dynamic Weather
• Improved Diesel-Electric Simulation
• Improved Steam Simulation
• Revamped GUI
• User & Save Manager
• Sandbox Game Mode
• Localization
• Various smaller improvements, to be announced

[b]In progress, but coming after Simulator:[/b]

• Simulation of other loco types (DH, DM, E)
• New Locomotives (S060, E6, DM1P, DE6 Slug...)
• Locomotive Mod Support
• New Cars & Cargo Types
• New Industries, Cities & Villages
• Revamped Railway Network (double-tracks, electrification, etc.)
• Improved Gameplay (better job system and more)

Many of the features from the latter list get requested frequently, so we want you to know they’re taken care of and being worked on -- however we’ll only be ready to reveal more information about them some time after the release of Simulator. As we are now deeply focused on the future and getting Simulator ready for release, we’ve decided to skip the next small build and merge it into Simulator instead. When we get closer to the launch in a couple of months, we’ll have a new trailer, new screenshots, in-depth videos and overall more details about the massive update! In other great news, after a long search, we’ve recently grown our team with two additional highly skilled programmers. Our work output is notably ramping up and we can’t wait to start churning out the exciting new features and content in 2022! Until then, thank you for your patience and understanding! We wish you a great holiday season ahead! -Slobodan